Posts tagged crime

One of the reasons that Silk Road was so popular and dangerous was because it enabled people who would have otherwise never dealt drugs to become Scarface-like kingpins. That's the tale of Michael Duch, an IT consultant who has wound up being sentenced to two and a half years in prison for dealing...

A 21-year-old from New Hampshire has been charged with a range of crimes surrounding a grisly extortion scheme involving underage girls. The Department of Justice accuses Ryan J. Vallee of hacking into several teenagers' social media accounts, holding them hostage unless they sent him explicit ima...

Disgraced DEA agent Carl Force has pleaded guilty to charges of extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice. The official committed the crimes while himself investigating the online black market Silk Road, as well as the activities of its founder, Russ "Dread Pirate Roberts" Ulbricht. I...

A year and a half following his arrest, the leader of the 'Blackshades' hacking ring is going behind bars. An American judge has sentenced Alex Yucel to 57 months (4.75 years) in prison after he pled guilty to charges that he distributed remote access malware to "thousands" of crooks, who used it...

When the US Bureau of Industry and Security published how it plans to implement the sections on hacking technologies in a global weapons trade pact called the Wassenaar Arrangement (WA) last week, it ignited an online firestorm of meltdowns, freakouts, and vicious infighting within the most respec...

A teenager from Idaho has landed themselves in hot water after arranging a takedown of their school district's internet access. KTVB News reports that the 17-year-old student paid a third party to conduct a distributed denial of service attack that forced the entire West Ada school district offlin...

Following the police-shooting death of Michael Brown and subsequent riots in Ferguson, MO, the Obama administration assembled a task force charged with somehow easing the adversarial relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry. The White House released those findings this morning and al...

Years before stolen pictures of celebs hit the internet in a massive bundle, news that Reddit posters were searching for private photos popped up under the term "fusking." As detailed by Buzzfeed in August of 2012, Reddit channels were dedicated to using a security flaw in Photobucket.com to searc...

In an effort to reduce police abuses that have occurred with frightening regularity throughout the US, the Southern California branch of the ACLU has just released a new smartphone app designed to securely record your next interaction with law enforcement. Sure, you could simply snap photos and ta...

Believe it or not, police have a real problem with identifying suspects who are identical twins -- unless you're willing to spend a month sequencing genes, DNA samples are all but useless. They may be far more effective in the future, though, as British researchers have developed a technique that...

The aim of a jury trial is to recreate a moment of history with sufficient detail to let a people decide what the truth is. But unless there's video footage of the event, it can often be difficult to visualize just what went on. It's a puzzle that documentarian and VR pioneer Nonny De la Pe&ntilde...

Posting revenge porn has always been a bad idea, but the UK is about to make examples of those heartless enough to share nude photos of their exes. As of Monday, the country's Criminal Justice and Court Act treats revenge porn as a specific crime. Publicize racy private images with the "intent to...